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About the Course

Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind", game theory is the
mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and
irrational) agents. Beyond what we call 'games' in common language, such
as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict
among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading
behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model eBay,
Google keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without
accounting for the incentives of the people using them? The course will
provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive
form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games
(modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and
more. We'll include a variety of examples including classic games and
real-world applications.

Recommended Background

You must be comfortable with mathematical thinking and rigorous
arguments. Relatively little specific math is required; the course
involves lightweight probability theory (for example, you should know
what a conditional probability is) and very lightweight calculus (for
instance, taking a derivative).

Suggested Readings

The following background readings provide more detailed coverage of the
course material:

Essentials of Game Theory, by Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav
Shoham; Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2008. This book has the same
structure as the course, and covers most of the same material. It is
free if you access the link from a school that subscribes to the
Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures, and otherwise costs $5 to
download. You can also get it as a printed book from (e.g.)
amazon.com, or as an ebook for
Kindle or
Google devices.

Course
Format

The course consists of the following materials:

Videos. The lectures are delivered via videos, which are
broken into small chunks, usually between five and fifteen minutes
each. There will be approximately one and a half hours of video
content per week. You may watch the lecture videos at your
convenience. Lower-resolution videos are also available for those
with slow internet connections.

Slides. We have made available pdf files of all the
lecture slides.

Quizzes. There will be non-graded short "quiz" questions
that will follow some of the videos to help you gauge your
understanding.

Online Lab Exercises After some of the videos, we will
ask you to go online to play some games. These are entirely
optional, and are designed to illustrate some of the concepts from
the course.

Problem Sets. There will also be graded weekly problem
sets that you will also answer online, but may work through offline;
those must be completed within two weeks of the time that they are
posted in order to be graded for full credit. If you miss a problem
set deadline, you may complete it before the end of the course for
half credit. You may discuss problems from the problem sets with
other students in an online forum, without providing explicit
answers.

Final Exam. There will be an online final exam that you
will have to complete within two weeks of its posting. Once you
begin the exam, you will have four hours to complete it.

Screen-side Chats. We periodically hold online
chats where we answer questions and discuss topics relevant to the
course. See an archive
here.